Walter Chow on The Lovely Bones:
Tell me again why this film is set in a garish 1973? The effect of it is that when Jackson isn’t fucking around with his misguided period noodling, he’s fucking around in a What Dreams May Come computer-generated fantasia–the two settings having no real connection to one another save their mutually ironclad dedication to avoiding anything of gravity.
The legal structure that we now contemplate for the accessing of books is even more complex than the legal structure that we have in place for the accessing of films. Or more simply still: we are about to make every access to our culture a legally regulated event, rich in its demand for lawyers and licenses, certain to burden even relatively popular work. Or again: we are about to make a catastrophic cultural mistake.
—”For The Love Of Culture” by Larry Lessig in The New Republic.
The fourth annual French Film Festival begins in at the Rialto Cinemas in Newmarket on February 10th with what the festival organisers are labelling a “world ‘avant-première’”—the film being shown, Tony Gatlif’s Korkoro (Liberté) will not open in France until February 24th.
Gatlif is perhaps best known outside France for Exils, a road movie starring Romain Duris, and his new film follows a Gypsy family—Gatlif has Gypsy heritage—during the Second World War as they travel across France. Eventually encountering problems with the Vichy régime, they start off for greener pastures, but not before having taken an orphan under their collective wing. The life of gangster Jacques Mesrine, whom a friend of mine once said “could school [John] Dillinger any day,” is given the spotlight in a pair of César-winning films by Jean-François Richet entitled L’instict du mort and Public Enemy N° 1.
Vincent Cassel stars in the title role, and the films have become a massive success in France. The films have been praised as “Scarface en Français”. Elsewhere in the programme: Costa-Gavras’ Eden à l’Ouest, which the director has called his most personal film to date, Claude Chabrol’s Bellamy, and Jennifer Devoldère’s Jusqu’à toi, a rom-com starring Mélanie Laurent.
The festival concludes on February 18th with Stéphane Brizé’s Mademoiselle Chambon before moving on to Wellington and Christchurch. Student tickets are $13 Mon-Thu or $14 for Friday, Saturday and Sunday sessions. For screening times and more information, see frenchfilmfestival.co.nz
Skateboarding, graffiti and street art, art rock and avant-garde filmmaking collide in this doc that looks at the ragtag bunch of punks and weirdoes—probably most succinctly labelled nowadays simply as ‘hipsters’—who congregated around various American art scenes in the 1990s. Among those profiled are Mike Mills, Spike Jonze, Harmony Korine, Ed Templeton, Margaret Kilagen and Shepard Fairey—the last of whom rose to prominence recently with his Socio-Realist “hope” poster design for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. But, more than just a cinematic peek at those artists’ work, this is practically a manifesto for the DIY movement; it celebrates the unusual, idiosyncratic and just plain weird in everything from fashion to literature, music and cinema, from R. Crumb to David Foster Wallace, Chuck Palahniuk, Bret Easton Ellis, Jay McInerney, Vincent Gallo, David Gordon Green, Richard Linklater, Dave Eggers, Noah Baumbach and Wes Anderson—not to mention pretty much every band that’s spilled out of Brooklyn over the past seven or eight years. Behold our Beat Generation.
They say your body loses 21 grams when you die… but what happens when you lose your soul? In this Kaufmanesque dark comedy, Paul Giamatti plays a character called… Paul Giamatti, a theatre actor struggling with the title role in a production of Chekov’s Uncle Vanya. In order to lighten the burden, he goes to a futuristic-looking facility and has his soul extracted and stored. But when he finds the soulless life just as unbearable, he goes back to the doctors—only they’ve misplaced the container. At first they think it might have been sent to their warehouse in New Jersey, but it turns out that it’s in Russia. Meanwhile, Paul has imbibed the soul of a Russian poet, and has become involved with a woman who specialises in soul trafficking—a soul mule. So he goes to St. Petersburg to recover his soul which is being kept warm by the ditzy soap-opera star wife of a rich Mafioso type who runs the soul-extraction racket there. The germ for the film came to writer-director Sophie Barthes in a dream: she and a bunch of people were sitting in a waiting room holding boxes containing their souls. She couldn’t open her own, but Woody Allen was sitting next to her, and his soul looked like a chickpea. In the vein of I ♥ Huckabees and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, although not quite as frankly comic as either, this is a superbly-made, witty and intelligent film with a well-chosen cast including Lauren Ambrose, Emily Watson and David Strathairn. To top it off, the cinematography by Barthes’ husband Andrij Parekh (Half Nelson) is at once stark and warmly inviting.
Woody Allen’s latest, starring Larry David, co-creator of Seinfeld and star of HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm, is his first in New York since the unjustly maligned Anything Else in 2003—and one of his best since 1998’s Celebrity. David plays Boris Yelnikoff, a crotchety old man who was once an eminent physics professor at Columbia nominated for a Nobel Prize for his work on string theory. His outlook on life is about as bleak as it gets: we’re all minute particles in an ever-expanding universe eking out a meaningless existence, drifting away from one another and hurtling toward death faster than we can conceive. He’s imposed upon by a runaway from the deep south, the ridiculously-named Melodie St. Ann Celestine (an excellent Evan Rachel Wood) and lets her stay in his apartment. Her mother and father (Patricia Clarkson and Ed Begley, Jr., also both excellent) come to take her back home, only to find she’s married the most chronic hypochondriac neurotic chess tutor in New York. Written in the ’70s, the film has much of the feel of Allen’s other work from that period, particularly Annie Hall and Alvy Singer’s ‘eggs’ speech—mirrored here in the protagonist’s beautifully-rendered life philosophy delivered at the end of the film: “Whatever love you can get and give, whatever happiness you can filch or provide—every temporary measure of grace; whatever works.”
David Mitchell and Robert Webb’s BAFTA-winning sketch comedy show continues in the same brilliantly absurdist mode in which it began, occasionally going to the very limits of taste and decency. The six half-hour episodes feature recurring skits focussed on everything from ‘Numberwang’—surely the greatest fictional game show ever imagined—to jokes about the naming of New South Wales and Virginia—and two lazy British TV writers making an American courtroom drama called Speedo: an unknowing mash up of House and That Guy’s faux reality show Speedo Cops. There’s also the uncouth cider-guzzling alcoholic Sir Digsby Chicken Ceasar—who is more street bum than private eye—and a behind-the-scenes look at a movie about cricket being made by people who had never heard of the game before. Includes a second disc with a short behind the scenes segment and various outtakes.
Rem Koolhaas: A Kind of Architect
Profile of the Dutch architect—who in his youth made films with Wim Wenders’ cinematographer Robby Müller and the director Jan de Bont—that tends toward a dry, academic tone in its presentation and style. Ideally a documentary should be able to make any subject compelling; unfortunately this is largely unexciting save for coverage of Koolhaas’ book “Delirious New York” and the last quarter, which examines the architect’s innovative design for the CCTV headquarters in Beijing, completed for the 2008 Olympic Games.
W.
Oliver Stone’s third Presidential biopic, and this one while the Commander in Chief was still in office! Josh Brolin’s Dubya is a commendable interpretation of a near-illiterate warmonger, and Stone’s script is certainly well-researched, but ultimately the film conflates too many characters and incidents—and is, chronologically speaking—too close to its subject to achieve the necessary critical distance. Entertaining, but ultimately more parody than critique—and less engaging for it.
Rachel Getting Married
Jonathan Demme (director of countless music videos and concert films, and the superb doc Jimmy Carter: Man from Plains) crafted one of the best pictures of 2008 in this slice-of-life film from an effervescent script by Jenny Lumet, daughter of director Sidney. Anne Hathaway stars as a drug addict given a weekend pass from rehab to attend her sister’s wedding—a performance which garnered her a well-deserved Oscar nomination—as well as Rosemarie DeWitt, the profoundly talented Anna Deavere Smith and, in his first film role, Tunde Adebimpe, front man of the Brooklyn band TV on the Radio. A snapshot of the dynamics of a family in various states of disrepair, and a vérité-style portrait of relationships both blossoming and breaking down, Rachel Getting Married is a profoundly engrossing piece of work.
Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist
Michael Cera and Kat Dennings (Charlie Bartlett) alongside up-and-comer Ari Graynor (Whip It, Youth In Revolt) in this quick-paced ‘New-York-minute’ teen-rom-com. A poppy soundtrack, cameos from Aaron Yoo, Jay Baruchel and SNL’s Seth Meyers and Andy Samberg, and the two effervescent lead performances keep things fresh and save the story from its own clichés.
Irma Vep
One of French director Olivier Assayas’ best films, this stars a perfectly-cast Maggie Cheung (In The Mood for Love) as an her actress self and Jean-Pierre Léaud (The 400 Blows) as an insane, egotistical genius director trying to remake—or, more accurately, re-imagine—Louis Feuillade’s 1915 silent serial Les Vampires. In the tradition of 8½ and other films about filmmaking, this 1996 film is both a comedy about the impossibility of movie-making and a commentary on trends in then-current French cinema. But perhaps more simply than all that, it was Assayas’ way of wooing and appreciating the beauty of Cheung, who would marry the director the following year.
The Secret
Supernatural thriller in which David Duchovny’s wife Hannah and teenage daughter Sam—played by Lili Taylor (TV’s Six Feet Under) and Olivia Thirlby (Juno, Uncertainty)—are involved in a car crash. Sam survives—only to find she swapped souls with her mother at the moment of death. Thus Hannah, in Sam’s body, must learn to navigate her daughter’s world, which she finds was much murkier than Sam let on. There’s the usual tacky presentation of some sort of ethereal ‘afterlife,’ but what could have easily turned into an awfully tacky by-the-numbers TV movie—with writing and direction to match—is rescued by excellent performances by Thirlby and Taylor.
M.G.M. Film Noir
Four classic films noir from the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer vaults, restored and presented in a four-disc box set. The best of the lot is Orson Welles’ The Stranger, from 1946, in which Edward G. Robinson’s UN War Crimes Commissioner tracks down Welles’ Nazi fugitive Franz Kindler, who has adopted a new name since the war and taken a job as a university professor in Connecticut. Odds Against Tomorrow stars a relatively young Harry Belafonte and, unusually for its time, pulsates vibrantly to a jazzy score, while in the Dalton Trumbo-scripted He Walked By Night John Garfield’s cop killer gets tangled up with a young girl eager to escape to the excitement of the wrong side of the tracks.
Night Of The Living Dead
Still scary after all these years, George A. Romero’s landmark black-and-white Zombie pic—whose influence reverberates to this day in wave after wave of films imitating its techniques—has been meticulously remastered and beautifully packaged for its 40th anniversary. A group of freaked-out strangers boards up inside a farmhouse and listens to increasingly paranoid—but tense and believable—radio and TV news broadcasts in order to escape a rampant horde of zombies that converges outside. Eventually they realise there’s no way to escape the congress of the undead but to fight them head-on. Includes the newly-commissioned extensive feature-length documentary “One for the Fire” as well as interviews and an audio commentary with Romero, writer John Russo and various cast and crew.
Les Enfants Terribles
Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1950 film of Jean Cocteau’s novel—whose title translates as “The Holy Terrrors” or, literally, “The Horrible Children”—has been wonderfully restored and packaged on DVD. Co-written by Melville, it follows brother and sister Elisabeth and Paul as they seal themselves off from the outside world and play mind games with each another—and anyone brave enough to enter their world; the film’s obvious influence on Bertolucci’s The Dreamers is apparent almost from the first frame. Although it was only Melville’s third feature, his fondness for occasionally balletic camerawork is already apparent, as is his attention to detail.
Painters Painting
This 1973 doc, new to DVD, about the New York School of painters is dry but interesting for its archival contents, including interviews with de Kooning, Warhol, Jasper Johns, Barnett Newman and Hans Hoffman. Explores the work of a number of movements ranging from pop art to abstract impressionism, and attempts to probe the psyche of the postwar American painter—his influences, his identity and his motivation.
Cadillac Records
A re-telling of the story of how the Chess Records blues label grew out of Chicago to claim its influential place in music history. With Adrien Brody as Leonard Chess, Jeffrey Wright as Muddy Waters and Beoncyé Knowles as Etta James, the film is directed and scripted with a heavy hand; the writing stifles some great performances that only seldom peek through, and the film is overall too in-your-face.
Diagnosis: Death
Straight-to-DVD kiwi horror-rom-com starring Jessica Grace Smith and stand-up comic Raybon Kan as drug-test volunteers holed up in a cancer ward that used to be the psych ward where an author named Christine Mansfield—who wrote a book called “An Angel at my Picnic”—spent her last, depressed days. Increasingly bizarre supernatural happenings occur amid a burgeoning romance. With a lively script written by Kan and cameos from the Flight of the Conchords and their manager Murray, the film is frequently funny but, as with many small NZ films, its tight budget makes the end product seem like B-roll or rehearsal footage.
Late Spring
Yasujiro Ozu’s favourite of his own films, remastered and available on DVD for the first time in New Zealand. Set in post-war Tokyo, the film follows Noriko, a young woman who looks after her aging widowed father, who takes it upon himself to organise a husband for his daughter. A delicate, emotional portrait of family dynamics.
Revanche
Götz Spielman’s revenge tragedy about a Ukranian prostitute and an ex-con is stylistically amazing and beautifully photographed—with performances to match. Frankly sexual and explosively dramatic, this is European art house film at its finest. (A nice picture but irritatingly patchy subtitles on the local disc, though—not to mention the lack of special features, unlike the Criterion collection’s meticulous [US] release.)
Two cult classic Australian films recently restored by the National Film & Sound Archive show that our neighbours over the ditch are up there with the best when it comes to gritty, controversial filmmaking. Wake In Fright, directed by Canadian Ted Kotcheff in 1970, has as much in common with Billy Wilder’s Lost Weekend as it does with Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout. Released internationally under the more accessible, less threatening title Outback, its protagonist is a schoolteacher played by British actor Gary Bond, who at the end of the school term arrives in the small mining town of Bundanyabba—known to the locals simply as ‘The Yabba’—en route to Sydney. One of the locals invites him to have a drink, and his one night in town extends to five. By the end of the week he’s gambled away most of his money, downed a ridiculous amount of alcohol, and is contemplating suicide. Tom Cowan’s 1976 film Journey Among Women is equally hair-raising, but for different reasons. Set in late-18th century colonial Australia, a group of convict women escapes a fetid, repugnant jail cell—and their equally disgusting captors—and flees to the bush to live a semi-feral life. The film is important from both a feminist standpoint and simply as a record of independent Australian filmmaking. Both films are presented in a two-disc set and include interviews, commentaries and other material, as well as a booklet with essays—and in the case of Journey Among Women, a collection of the director’s various short films. Raw, energetic and uncompromising, these two films are some of the best to have ever emerged from ‘the land down under’.
Adventureland
A romantic comedy/‘summer’ movie set in the late-80s that refreshingly manages to steer clear of all the clichés those three labels would normally denote. Jesse Eisenberg (Zombieland, the forthcoming Kill Your Darlings) and Kristen Stewart (the tweenage glittery-vampire Mormon abstinence parable Twilight, the forthcoming Joan Jett biopic The Runaways) star as a couple of bored teenagers who get crappy summer jobs in an amusement park, smoke pot and fall in love. Has a firm grip on its brand of understated, comedy and perfectly captures the awkwardness of adolescent romantic fumblings. This is the best film of its kind since Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused.
Paul Blart: Mall Cop
An amalgam of everything that is wrong with middle America. An obese, Segway-riding, power-tripping mall security guard (Kevin James, TV’s King of Queens) hell-bent on asserting his moral authority and imposing his will on others finds himself alone in the mall with a bunch of “terrorists.” Surprise surprise, he saves the day and gets the girl. Aimed at the lowest common denominator, this has more contempt for its audience than Transformers 2 or Roland Emmerich’s particularly vomitous brand of apocalypse porn. Inferior to Jody Hill’s riotous mall cop flick Observe and Report in almost every way, this is the cinematic equivalent of a nearly-indigestible 3a.m. kebab.
Fanboys
It’s pre-Bittorrent 1999, and a group of Star Wars nerds wants to sneak one of their number into Skywalker Ranch to see a workprint of The Phantom Menace before he dies of some kind of cancer that’s never really fully explained. There’s a road trip, a Kevin Smith-like level of pop culture reverence/homage, and the obligatory American Pie-style antics (and dick and fart jokes) expected from something of this calibre. There’s Kristen Bell (TV’s Veronica Mars, Heroes, and the uncredited voiceover on Gossip Girl) who provides both feminine wiles—boobies—and comic relief. There’s the always-great Jay Baruchel (from Judd Apatow’s oft-unjustly maligned Undeclared) and, up front, Sam Huntington, who it turns out hasn’t really done anything non-suckful since 1999’s glorious paean to glam-rock, Detroit Rock City. Great fun if you turn your mind off almost entirely—or are suitably inebriated.
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